Stud Rites (11 page)

When Betty Burley arrived at the booth bearing the heavy lamp, I knew only what Duke had told me. ”The parking lot is crawling with police,” Betty complained. She sounded like a fastidious homemaker describing a dishwasher invaded by ants. She thrust the lamp at me. ”Here, take this thing, will you? My arms are aching. I had to carry it all the way here. When I saw which way the wind was blowing, instead of moving it to my van, I marched right into the hotel and straight to my room, and then I went back and got the wolf prints.”

”Which way
is
the wind blowing?” I asked.

”Well, now they’ve got the whole area cordoned off—that whole end of the parking lot—so if I hadn’t hustled out there and whisked everything away, for all I know, they wouldn’t have let me move it at all! And hideous as this thing is, it’s arousing a lot of interest.” As she spoke, one of our rescue people, a guy named Gary Galvin, arrived with the prints. The heavy antique frames were handsome, but the subjects made me uncomfortable, mainly, I think, because I saw them as rather silly allegories. In one, a lonely looking wolf was howling at a faceless moon:
Rescue Lifts a Lone Voice in an Uncaring Wilderness.
The other was a grisly depiction of a wolf attempting to disembowel an elk that was kicking and fighting back:
Compassion Battles Politics, the Outcome Undecided.
Or maybe
Freida Reilly and Sherri Ann Printz Do Battle for a Seat on the Board. A
woman named Isabelle, who trailed after Gary, was carrying the cardboard box that contained the Inuit sculpture, the jewelry, and the other small valuables. The first to arrive at the rescue booth, I’d gently unshrouded the silent-auction items, made sure they were matched with the correct bid sheets, and otherwise readied the display to present what Betty Burley was always calling ”a positive image of rescue.” I’d felt so much like a Barbara Pym character, an excellent woman making herself useful at a church jumble sale, that I’d half expected someone to come up and offer me the first in a series of endless cups of tea. Now, as Betty rearranged the table I’d tidied up, Gary slipped me two videotapes. ”One’s last night’s showcase,” he said. ”Betty can’t object to that. And the other’s the obedience bloopers.”

”Betty will have a fit,” I whispered. ”Gary, Betty says the whole back of the parking lot is cordoned off and... Do you have any idea what’s going on? Someone told me that Hunnewell was dead, but...” Even if no one had informed me of Hunnewell’s demise, the presence of a substitute judge in one of the two baby-gated rings would have alerted me that something was wrong. In one ring, all was as it should have been: Today’s sweepstakes judging—another innocent gambling game—was already under way. In the second ring, the one that should have belonged to Judge James Hunnewell, the competition for championship points—
the
show—was due to start. In preparation, Judge Mikki Muldoon was dutifully pacing up and down:

The condition of the ring is the judge’s responsibility. Maybe the Pope, too, is obligated to check the Vatican’s streets for potholes. Within the ring, the judge’s authority is as absolute as his. Authority dies with death.
The judge is dead,
I thought.
Long live the judge.

Before Gary could answer my query about what was going on, Betty asked me the same question I’d just asked him, but her tone was the one I use to accuse the dogs of crimes I’ve actually watched them commit. ”Holly Winter,” Betty demanded, ”what is going on here?”

Instead of pointing to the substitute videotapes, however, she banged her tote bag and a photograph album down on the table. We had two albums. One was a big, fat maroon binder overstuffed with snapshots and stories about malamutes rescued all over the country. The other—the one Betty slammed down— was a slim beige volume devoted exclusively to the dogs who’d appeared in last night’s showcase. The separate album for the showcase dogs had been Betty’s idea, and it was Betty who’d put it together. I’d looked through the big album, but I already knew about the showcase dogs. In straightening out the booth, I’d lined the beige album up next to the fat maroon one. Otherwise, I Hadn’t touched it. I reached the obvious conclusion: Betty had learned that in Jeanine’s presence someone had called our rescue dogs ”trash.” Furthermore, Betty knew that I’d kept the episode from her.

Before I could confess, however, Betty raged: ”You had absolutely no business removing Cubby’s pedigree or that page of the stud book or anything else!”

Cubby, I remind you, was Jeanine’s dog. As I’ve said, Jeanine’s reason for adopting a big dog wasn’t something she’d have wanted boomed over a sound system. But Betty was talking about the second piece of information I’d suppressed. Cubby, who’d been bought at a pet shop, had been turned in to Rescue with AKC Papers. As I mentioned earlier, in running his pedigree, I’d found that way back there in Cubby’s unfortunate family tree of puppy-mill dogs was an ancestor bred by Sherri Ann Printz, a dog that bore her kennel name. The dog had been registered as Pawprintz Attic Emprer and owned by Gladys H. Thacker, who, as I’ve mentioned, farmed puppies in the state of Missouri. According to the stud book, she’d had malamutes for decades. After I’d taken Cubby in and placed him with Jeanine, I’d sent a full report to Betty, who’d threatened to include Cubby’s pedigree in our showcase album. Until now, I’d assumed she’d been joking. I seldom raise my voice, even at people. ”You did not! Damn it! I never meant—”

Betty interrupted. I fell silent. In the hierarchy of Rescue, she outranked me. ”If people don’t see it, they just go on thinking that those poor dogs being bred to death in the puppy mills have nothing whatsoever to do with
their
dogs. May I point out that
you
were the one who proposed that we take out an ad in the
Quarterly
and start publishing these pedigrees? And if memory serves me, Cubby was exactly the dog you had in mind.”

A regular feature of the
Malamute Quarterly
is what’s known as the centerfold: a celebration of a famous malamute, including an article written by the dog’s breeder or owner, photographs, of course, and a pedigree. What I’d proposed, strictly in jest, was a corresponding centerfold of rescue, with Cubby as a sort of Playdog Rescue Bunny, mainly because, as his pedigree revealed, his Pawprintz ancestor had been sired by the legendary Northpole’s Comet.

I was ripping. ”Betty, you knew then and you know perfectly well now: It was strictly a joke. When I sent you that pedigree and the page of the stud book with that dog’s registration, it was understood that the information was totally confidential. I did not intend to humiliate anyone, and you had no business putting that stuff out here where everyone could see it!”

”As a matter of fact,” Betty responded tartly, ”that material was not in the album. It was in
my
private tote bag, which you had no business with, Holly Winter. For your information, I intended to give Cubby’s pedigree to Jeanine, and I also had several others that I intended to give to other people. But in the rush, I forgot.”

”Betty, I did
not
remove those pages! I never even looked in your bag.”

Isabelle intervened. In a near whisper, she interjected, ”If the two of you don’t cool it, you’re going to find yourselves starring on tonight’s evening news.”

The TV reporters and camera crews had arrived in the exhibition hall in plenty of time to capture the arrival of the police; and since the media people happened to be there anyway, they performed the incidental task of informing us of the murder of James Hunnewell. It was a Channel 5 interviewer who told me that Hunnewell had been bludgeoned to death. Her name was Alex Travis. I’d seen her on TV. She looked almost the same in person—no fatter, no thinner, very young, with sleek black hair and perfect skin, her lipstick and blush a little redder than on TV so her color wouldn’t wash out on camera. According to Alex Travis, James Hunnewell had been murdered last night. His bed hadn’t been slept in. His body had been cold. Alex Travis was the one who used the phrase ”blunt instrument” and who told me that whatever it was, it hadn’t been found.

I strongly suspected otherwise.

IN THE THIRTIES, dogs were big news. Other socialites just threw parties, but Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge gave fantastic dog shows at her New Jersey estate, Giralda. Mrs. M. Hartley Dodge wasn’t the only Rockefeller prominent in the dog fancy, and
The New York Times
faithfully reported on the Morris and Essex shows and lots of others as well. In the thirties, Admiral Byrd was news. So were sled dog racing, the Chinook Kennels, breeds newly recognized by the AKC, show results, everything.

So on this November day, the murder of Judge James Hunnewell transported us back to the future, forward to the past: cameras, yes, but video cameras; brilliant halogen lights; and umbrella-shaped devices with undersides of shiny metallic foil, parasols devised to bounce limelight off clouds with silver linings. In the aisles around the rings, in the parking lot, in the grooming tent, the dogs preened for cameras,
whroo-whrooed
into microphones, and rose up to rest gentle, mammoth snowshoe paws on the shoulders of startled, flattered reporters here to cover a homicide.

Basking in the reflected light of one of the silver-lined umbrellas, Betty Burley grabbed the opportunity to make an ardent pitch for the wonderful, friendly, healthy, young rescue malamutes who awaited loving adoptive homes. I should have done the same, but my face was still stinging from Betty’s verbal slap. Instead, I wandered around exchanging rumors, eavesdropping on conversations, watching the judging, and otherwise doing pretty much what I’d have done if James Hunnewell had still been breathing.

The arrival of the police had put an end to the worry that they’d halt the judging and maybe even force the cancellation of the national. Hunnewell’s room was sealed off immediately, and so was the area around the shed. Scrutinizing the entire hotel and its grounds, as well as the myriad of vans, campers, and cars, not to mention the hundreds of dogs and people, was a task no homicide team wanted to tackle. It would have meant summoning zillions of technicians to collect monumental amounts of evidence, all of which would have had to be processed and analyzed, and almost all of which would undoubtedly have been utterly irrelevant to the murder. People would have protested; search warrants might have been a problem. The course the police followed, as I see it now, was a sensible one meant to protect the evidence and maintain the availability of witnesses. If they’d closed down the hotel, for instance, what would they have done with us? The hundreds of hotel guests could hardly have been forced to camp out or to rent rooms elsewhere; with the show canceled, the dog people would’ve all gone home. Could we have been locked inside? Not for long. And no one, I imagine, wanted to smell the consequences of depriving the dogs of access to the outdoors. Furthermore, antagonizing
all
potential witnesses would have been a poor strategy for getting people to talk.

The air in the exhibition hall was thicker with theories than it was with dog hair. Nepotism: According to Pam Ritchie, who said she’d heard it from Freida Reilly, the police couldn’t close us down without ruining the wedding, and our national had been unintentionally saved by Crystal’s father, who had a brother high up in the attorney general’s office. Tiny DaSilva disagreed: the groom’s father, not the bride’s, and not a brother in the attorney general’s office, either, but a fraternity brother in the state police. In what I thought was an effort to present herself as the kind of fiscally minded person who’d make a splendid member of our breed club’s board, Sherri Ann Printz argued for strict economic determinism: The hotel brought money to Danville. Shut it down, and who’d ever book here again? Then there was the show-precinct debate: Had Hunnewell’s body been found on or off show grounds? Freida Reilly and a few other exceptionally devout worshipers at the shrine of AKC were apparently unable to conceive of circumstances in which the distinction didn’t matter. Freida may even have believed that if the hallowed ground of a show were desecrated by bloodshed, AKC was obliged to dispatch a high priest rep to reconsecrate the sanctuary; otherwise, like mock marriages, the awards wouldn’t count.

I watched and listened as a mousy-looking little breeder with a resplendent name—Celeste LaFlamme—casually told a police officer about a quirk of Mikki Muldoon’s that was universally taken for granted. I hate to speak ill of any dog, but if tomorrow’s competition had been for Worst of Breed instead of Best, Celeste’s dogs would have been the only ones to make the final cut. Every malamute of Celeste’s breeding had a pinched expression, a narrow front, feeble little legs, splayed feet, and wary-looking, hooded eyes. In other words, Celeste’s dogs looked astonishingly like Celeste herself, who didn’t belong at a national any more than they did. And here Celeste was informing the police about highly esteemed Judge Mikki Muldoon’s little quirk, which was that Mrs. Muldoon always carried a handgun and that it was always loaded.